Before America Was Discovered

The whale in Chapter 81 is not the whale. He is an ancient bull — jaundiced yellow, blind in one eye, missing a starboard fin, his spout coming in choked shreds and what Stubb calls "subterranean commotions," as though the sea itself is disagreeing with his digestion. He follows the pod at a distance, his wake a "dashed" thing, like two hostile currents meeting at his muzzle. He is pathetic. He is not Moby Dick.

He is also, it turns out, carrying something inside him.

When he finally dies — slowly, bleeding from "interior fountains" in "incessant streams," like a drought-river fed by springs in "far-off and undiscernible hills" — and the men cut in, they find first a corroded harpoon, long since healed over in his flesh, and then, not far from it, a lance-head of stone. Not iron. Stone. "The flesh perfectly firm about it."

"Who had darted that stone lance? And when? It might have been darted by some Nor' West Indian long before America was discovered."

The whale has been carrying this wound — perfectly healed, perfectly invisible — for longer than the nation whose ships now hunt him has existed. The men who killed him will never know his history. They know it now only because he is dead and open before them.

Thirteen chapters earlier, Ishmael spent two pages on the question of the whale's skin.

The debate is technical — is the skin the thin isinglass membrane you can scrape from the dead body, translucent as a bookmark (Ishmael has several, uses them as such: "It is pleasant to read about whales through their own spectacles")? Or is the skin the blubber itself, twelve to fifteen inches of it, the only dense enveloping layer the whale possesses?

Ishmael decides it must be the blubber. And then notices what this means: the outer surface of the Sperm Whale is "obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array" — like Italian line engravings. Beneath those, and seen through them as if "engraved upon the body itself," are what he calls hieroglyphics. Like pyramid markings. Undecipherable.

"The mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable."

And then: the sermon. Not a sermon Ishmael delivers — one he receives, from the whale:

"Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own."

The whale is a warm-blooded creature in freezing water, alive because his blubber insulates him completely — his blood warmer than a Borneo negro in summer, even at the Pole. He keeps a temperature of his own. He is in the world but not of it. The thick walls are not just protection — they are the virtue.

Then, immediately: "But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things!"

Melville gives you the moral and takes it back in the same breath. He knows it's impossible. The whale can do it; the man mostly cannot. He says it anyway.

Here is what these two chapters together make visible:

The virtue of the thick walls — the temperature retained against all weather, the inner warmth preserved regardless of the surrounding sea — is inseparable from the condition of the stone lance. You cannot have one without the other. The same self-containment that keeps the whale warm among ice is what keeps his history sealed inside him, perfectly healed over, visible only when the men cut in.

The hieroglyphics on the surface tell you nothing. "The mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable." The old harpoons and the older stone lances tell you everything — but only after he is dead.

This is not a criticism of the whale. Melville's sermon is genuine. The whale is genuinely admirable: warm-blooded in Arctic water, alive where others freeze, carrying its own climate wherever it goes. The thick walls work. The temperature is retained. Ahab cannot quite touch what he is after, even when he harpoons the whale, because the whale's innermost self was never near the surface to begin with.

But the cost of that self-sufficiency is that no living person ever knows the whale's history. The stone lance predates their civilization. The wound healed before anyone they know was born. The wound is as real as anything the whale carries — more real, perhaps, in the sense that it never left, never faded, was there every day of the whale's life for longer than nations have existed — and it is entirely invisible.

When Starbuck sees the old bull dying, pitiful, his one fin beating — "his fear of this vast dumb brute of the sea, was chained up and enchanted in him; he had no voice" — there is no way to know what the whale is also carrying. No way to know the Nor' West Indian's lance. No way to know whether the oldest wound is also the deepest.

Ahab demands the severed head speak. The head says nothing. The head is twenty feet behind the apparent forehead — Ishmael explained this nine chapters later; the brain was never where Ahab thought it was.

But before the false brow and behind the hieroglyphics and beneath the blubber of Chapter 68: the history is there. It is always there. It is perfectly firm. The flesh healed around it.

Melville's closing line in Chapter 81 breaks the narrative to address us directly: "Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend." Derick, the German captain of the Virgin, chased the wrong whale, discarded his oil-can overboard to gain speed in the chase — literally threw away what he came for — and then, having lost the old bull, promptly chased a Fin-Back: the uncatchable species, well known to be uncatchable, pursued with what Melville calls "bold, hopeful chase." He doesn't know what he's after. He has the whale-fever without the whale-knowledge. He is the pursuer who cannot distinguish the object of pursuit from the energy of pursuing.

He is also, Melville implies, most of us.

But Derick's error is not the whale's error. The whale's error, if it has one, is the opposite: it is so entirely itself, so thoroughly insulated from the world's read on it, that it dies carrying wounds no one alive knows about. The whale doesn't chase the wrong thing. The whale doesn't need to chase anything. It carries its own temperature, its own history, its own hieroglyphics — and is undecipherable.

What would it mean to model yourself after the whale? To retain a temperature of your own, in all seasons? To live in the world without being of it?

Melville says it's easy to say and hopeless to teach. Maybe it's also this: you would carry your wounds perfectly healed, your history invisible, your inner life legible only to those who cut deep enough — and only then.

The old bull, dying, knew the stone lance was there. Every day for longer than America has been America, he knew it. No one else did. That's what thick walls cost.